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Talk about a reversal of fortune. For how many years now has the Corvette versus 911 story gone something like this: Yes, the Porsche is faster around a track, built better, and more fun to drive; stops shorter; pulls more gs around a skidpad; and is the waking dream of every member of our staff. But…in a straight line, the Corvette will kick the German’s engine-stuffed ass back to Deutschland? I’d say close to 50 years now, give or take.

Well, what if we were to tell you that on the dragstrip a 2011 Porsche 911 Turbo that gives up two cylinders, more than 2 liters of displacement, and well over 100 horsepower to the Chevy absolutely gobsmacked the stuffing from a USDA Prime Corvette ZR1? On the flip side of that same coin, would you be willing to believe a General Motors product — one that quite literally began melting after a few hours in the hot California sun — not only beat but flat-out embarrassed a Nurburgring’d all-star twin-turbo AWD Porsche on a tricky, challenging, high-speed racetrack? What’s next, a black president?

This Porsche is quick. Wicked, stupid, unbelievably quick. How quick? In the history of this magazine, we’ve tested exactly two production cars that get to 60 mph in less time. One is the 1001-horsepower, $1 million-plus Bugatti Veyron (0-60 mph in 2.7 seconds), and other is…the 2011 Porsche 911 Turbo (2.8 seconds).

Huh? Well, it turns out the faster 2011 Turbo utilizes Porsche’s trick Doppelkupplung seven-speed dual-clutch transmission (aka PDK), unlike this here car, which has a low-tech six-speed manual. Meaning that the only thing slowing our white test car is the human being shoving the shifter. Still, all that elbow grease cost this Turbo only 0.2 second, making it the fastest to 60 mph manual transmission car we’ve ever tested.

Let’s take a moment and examine exactly how fast the Porsche Turbo gets out of its own way. Zero to 30 mph happens in one second. One! Think about that. Not moving. One one-thousand. 30 mph. It’s stupefying. By the time the Turbo hits 40 mph, the Corvette hasn’t even cracked 30. The Porsche also tears the quarter mile a new one in just 11.2 seconds.

A few more facts to twist your synapses: The Porsche weighs exactly 3500 pounds and makes 500 horsepower. That’s a computationally easy-to-figure 7 pounds per horsepower. The Corvette, on the other hand, weighs just 3329 pounds and makes 638 horsepower or 5.2 pounds per pony, a clear advantage. Yet the Vette takes a relatively leisurely 3.5 seconds to crack 60 mph and 11.5 seconds to run the quarter mile. Not only all that, but the Corvette is still half a second behind the Porsche at 100 mph (7.1 seconds versus 7.6).

The Porsche’s laws-of-physics-defying, catapult-like capabilities can come from only one place: traction. The 3.8-liter twin-turbo flat-six routes all its power to all four wheels, whereas the ZR1 has to make do with just two. True, the 335/25/20 Michelins on the ZR1’s rear-wheels do provide more than 2 feet of rotating rubber, but the Chevy‘s just not as good at hooking up as Stuttgart’s four wheels driven approach. After digesting the numbers, we began referring to the 911 Turbo as “Baby Veyron.”

While the Corvette’s launch mode provided a succession of very easy takeoffs at a governed 4000 rpm, we were able to achieve a slightly faster result (0.1 second better) with everything switched off, while launching the ZR1 from 1800 rpm. It did, however, take several aborted, tire-smoking attempts to nail it. The Porsche requires about 4000 rpm and a fast side-step of the clutch pedal to hit such audacious numbers. Simple, in fact, and surprisingly repeatable. Most of our test crew agreed they’d never treat their own $150,000 car in such an abusive manner. I was the lone holdout, arguing that Porsche seems to have designed the Turbo’s clutch to be beaten repeatedly. With an axe.

Speaking of design, we wonder how designed the Porsche’s acceleration numbers are. As mentioned, for generations, the only place where the Corvette routinely stomped the 911 was straight-line acceleration. Yes, the Porsche could grip better, lap faster, and fall apart less often than the Chevy, but dang it, man, on the dragstrip the Porsche owed the Vette its pink. That was yesterday. Today, at the end of 1240 feet, the Turbo was three-and-a-half car lengths ahead of the most powerful Corvette ever built. This Porsche seems to be following the Nissan GT-R’s lead: a factory-fresh bracket racer.

Here’s the thing. The Porsche’s trap speed is 125.3 mph, while the Corvette is moving at 126.9 mph and still fiercely accelerating. Meaning that if the race had been 3/8 of a mile, the Corvette would have won. This is all meaningless excuse-making, sure, but something to think about nonetheless. For the record, the slower-in-a-straight-line ZR1 was able to run around our figure eight nearly half a second faster than the Turbo (23.4 seconds versus 23.8); hold the road better (1.07 g for the Chevy versus 1.01 for the Porsche, even with its torque-vectoring rear axle); and stop two feet shorter from 60 mph (99 feet versus 101). On that last bit, the Corvette comes stock with gigantic, Enzo-derived and near-bulletproof carbon ceramic brakes. Similar, though smaller, stoppers are an $8000 option on the Porsche and were absent from our test car.

We brought both beasties out to Willow Springs Raceway, specifically the big track affectionately called Big Willow, to see how they’d run. More than one professional driver has told us that “Terrible” Turn 9 is as challenging a bend as any you’ll find on any track in the world. One such man is 24 Hours of Le Mans winner and GT2 world champion Justin Bell, and we just happened to bring him along. I took a few recon laps with the affable and potty-mouthed Brit before he strapped on the VBox and went for broke. As we approached Turn 9 for the first time, he said, “Thank God they put a cone out. Otherwise you’ve got f—all idea where you’re at.” Good to know.

Justin went out first in the ZR1 and laid down six hot laps for our data junkies, three with the PTM in mode 5 (see sidebar), the most aggressive setting, and three more with every handling aid turned off. The results startled us. Mr. Bell cracked off a 1:29.69 around Big Willow’s 2.5 miles with the PTM in Race Mode, and 1:30.11 with everything in the off position. This confirms Chevrolet’s assertion that PTM will make a good driver go faster. Said Justin, “If I had 10 laps and was told it didn’t matter if the car came back in one piece, I bet I could have gone faster without.” Still, the results are the results. The Porsche Turbo, meanwhile, was a good deal slower, with Justin’s best time being 1:33.31. That’s over 3.6 seconds behind the ZR1. After we told Justin his times and the discrepancy between the two, he commented, “That’s not even the same class of car.” But before your flag-waving heart explodes with pride, Bell said he’d rather own the Porsche.

But what about the common man? I drove both cars around Los Angeles for two weeks and can report the following: No one really cares that you’re in a $150,000 Porsche. You’re just another weenie with a briefcase full of cash. It seems the 911 is totally anonymous in the land of teen girls sexting each other in daddy’s DB9. Not so with the ZR1. Your $123,000 is well spent, as dudes in delivery vans gave our Blue Devil with a red dress multiple thumbs up. Every time I was at a gas station (and I was at dozens of them), someone yelled something akin to, “Sweet ride!” If I made the mistake of standing next to the ZR1 for longer than 10 seconds, I became ensnared in a 20-minute discussion about how cool this Corvette is. One guy in an M3 even chased me off the freeway (to a gas station) to let me know, “That car is sick!” We took both monsters to a local car show, parked them next to each other, and observed the crowd for an hour. If two people looked at the Porsche, 50 drooled all over the Chevrolet. And both cars were alternately parked in front of my house for two weeks, but I discovered pink lipstick marks only on the Corvette’s windshield. That’s right, someone kissed the ZR1.

You can take any two sports cars to the dragstrip, a racetrack, and a car show. However, we’re dealing with bona fide supercars here, two actual world-beaters. We decided further tests were in order to fully determine vehicular supremacy. The Mojave Spaceport and its 12,000-foot runway would give us the space needed to fully shake the cars out. First, a standing mile. Hey, why not? Second, a very severe, we-should-have-our-heads-examined, do-not-try-this-at-home 0-150-0 challenge. If you’re not familiar, the cars are launched as fast as possible to 150 mph and then we sledgehammer the brakes as hard as we possibly can. In past comparisons, both cars have been put through 0-100-0 evaluations, but as the performance bar has been raised so high with these two, we needed to step up our game.

As we expected and you imagined, the Corvette ZR1 did phenomenally in the mile, hitting 177 mph. That’s extremely fast, though only 3 mph faster than a Corvette Z06 we tested in 2006. Still, faster is faster. We actually got the plastic fantastic up to 190 mph before running out of runway. That latter figure is only 5 percent off the ZR1’s top speed of 200.4 mph. The Corvette then did 0-150-0 in 25.6 seconds. Sounds good to us, but what do you compare that number against? For the sake of silly, the brand-new, 1200-horse Bugatti Veyron Super Sport takes 25.6 seconds to go 0-200-0. So, there’s that.

What about the Porsche? Well, it broke. The twin variable-vane turbos stopped spooling and the boost went bye-bye as we were warming the car up for its runs. Why? As of this writing, we don’t know. Porsche speculates that a hose buried deeply within the nearly inaccessible engine bay “popped off.” Maybe, but not a single warning light flashed, yet the boost gauge indicated zero. All we know is the 3.8-liter flat-six reverted back to natural aspiration and the Turbo couldn’t participate in our big boy tests. Bummer.

But let’s say it had. Let’s say the Porsche held itself together and did the standing mile and the 0-150-0. What if, as indicated by the Corvette’s higher trap speed and otherworldly brakes, the Porsche were slower? Alternatively, what if it were faster and its steel brakes did the impossible and beat the Corvette? Would these numbers affect the outcome of this comparison? In a word, no. To paraphrase Werner Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration,” the numbers represent cold facts, the “truth of accountants.” But they tell you little about the soul of the car, the “ecstatic truth” of the vehicle in question.

The Porsche Turbo is a world-class car. There’s nothing it does poorly, and, as far as we can tell, it has no weak points, busted scrolls notwithstanding. Some of my colleagues prefer the Porsche to the ZR1, saying the Turbo is the better all-around car, less brassy and ostentatious, and thereby better suited for adults. The rest of us are apparently more intimately in touch with our inner child, because we feel the Turbo is a tad…dull. Can a car that hits 60 mph in 3 seconds be dull? No, but in comparison to the screaming banshee thrills doled out by the ZR1 every time you bury the go-pedal, the Porsche felt stodgy. In fact, when we ran the Turbo against the Audi R8 V-10 and the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, the only real gripe concerning the Porsche was that it’s a little…dull.

The ZR1, on the other hand, is a hot mess of excitement sitting on four big chrome wheels. The noise is lascivious; the looks are sinister bordering on subversive; and the way it rockets down the road with the profligate torque almost overwhelming the rubber with every shift is habit-forming. On the other hand, the ZR1’s build quality is suspicious; the fuel consumption is sinful; and the seats are, as always, terrible for corner-filled driving. Still, just sitting in the best-ever Corvette is an event, never mind the gallons of blood that start pumping through your system when you press the starter button, or the foot-wide smile that appears when you shift into second gear at full throttle.

Back to reality for a moment: You can’t go wrong with either supercar. They both give you something that 99 percent of the other cars on earth simply can’t, and I for one would be thrilled to own either. The Porsche did break, so maybe this comparison gets an asterisk. And maybe next time Stuttgart shows up with a car more up to the gauntlet dropped by the ZR1, like the RWD 620 horsepower GT2 RS. Until then…the Porsche Turbo is an incredibly potent and precise scientific achievement, but the Corvette ZR1 is a fever dream.

1ST PLACE: Chevrolet Corvette ZR1
We’re still red-eyed, white-knuckled, and blue in the face over GM’s most powerful super-duper car.

In adding Performance Traction Management (PTM) to the ZR1, Chevrolet engineers had the noble goal of making you more confident, more consistent, and ultimately faster around a racetrack. Let’s be clear: PTM isn’t a safety system. It won’t save you from your own erratic inputs, nor will it clamp on the brakes in a safety-crazed fit and ruin your fun. But does it work?

THE THEORY: By looking at a dizzying array of sensors, PTM attempts to anticipate how much torque it can deliver to the rear wheels to maximize exit speed. When you reach the place in a corner where you would normally begin asking for small amounts of throttle, you go flat on the gas. All you need do is steer while the system modulates engine output.

To turn PTM on, double-tap the traction-control button. The selective ride dial changes to the PTM mode selector. By twisting it, you can choose:

MODE 1: For wet conditions or familiarization. Low torque delivery, and Active Handling is enabled.MODE 2: For dry conditions. More torque delivered, and Active Handling is tuned for dry conditions.

MODE 3: For a driver familiar with vehicle and track. Delivers more torque than Mode 2. MODE 4: Same torque delivery as Mode 3, but Active Handling is disabled. MODE 5: Delivers most torque. For drivers experienced with track and vehicle.

THE PRO: Justin Bell lapped Big Willow first in Mode 5, and then with all driving aids off. He noticed the biggest difference in Turns 3 and 4, a tight uphill left followed by a downhill right. “You’re ready to put opposite lock in and feather the throttle,” he says. But with PTM, Bell just maintained his steering, saying the ZR1 responded with less sideways movement and more forward acceleration. He was impressed that the system didn’t intrude at high speeds, but helped most in medium and slow-speed corners. And when he turned it off? “Suddenly, I had to work a lot harder,” he said. “Turn the computers off in a stealth fighter, and it falls out of the sky.”

But the data isn’t so clear-cut. With and without PTM, Bell’s fastest two laps traded corner exit speeds on every turn. And while Bell reported more assurance with the system on between Turns 3 and 4, he was actually faster in that section with it off. But while PTM’s ability to outdo the planning and throttle control of an accomplished racing driver remains doubtful, the confidence it adds to the car is unquestionable — Bell was 0.423 second faster with it on.– Carlos Lago

HISTORY LESSON: TURBO VS. ZR1

In many ways, these two supercars make for a logical comparison. Both cost more than $100,000, and both are extremely fast and wickedly capable. But one’s a GM product and the other, well, it’s a Porsche. Meaning that most people looking to buy a Corvette would never dream of even thinking about a Porsche, whereas your average Porsche owner would rather die than visit a Chevy dealer, let alone own a Corvette.

Luckily for you (and us), we get to pretend that comparing these two monsters makes perfect sense. We can make believe those interested in straight-line performance will spend a little more and purchase the Porsche Turbo, while the guys interested in the best track-day experience will rush out and purchase the ZR1. Sure, you’re more likely to see paparazzi shots of Glenn Beck making out with Nancy Pelosi, but it’s still fun to put the ZR1 head to head with the Turbo.

In fact, we’ve been at it for nearly two decades. Back in 1991, we pitted the Porsche 964 Turbo and Chevrolet C4 ZR1 against a Dodge Viper, Lotus Esprit Turbo, Mazda RX-7, and Toyota Supra Turbo. That particular ZR1 had some issues, as its dragstrip numbers were way down compared with earlier tests conducted in 1990: 5.2 seconds to 60 mph versus 4.4 seconds, and 13.8 at 106 mph through the quarter versus 12.8 at 113 mph.

Regardless, the Porker blew away the entire field, running to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds and eliminating the quarter mile in 12.7 seconds at 112.3 mph. The Vette? Only the Mazda RX-7 was slower than the ZR1. Porsche was also numero uno in the 0-100-0 test, doing the deed in 14.7 seconds versus the fourth-place ZR1’s 17.4 seconds. But when it came to top speed, not only did the LT5-engined super Corvette win, it dominated, maxing out at 181 mph. The Porsche was second place at a respectable 172 mph; however, we hated going that fast.

“To master this car, it’s not necessary that your father drove for Auto Union in the ’30s, but it helps,” we quipped. More to the point, “The Porsche 911 Turbo with a short wheelbase and ‘vintage’ suspension design, was the definition of a handful: At 172 [mph], it was thrilling but not very enjoyable.” The Corvette ZR1, on the other hand, “hammered straight and true, making it the fastest of the group and one of the easiest to drive.” In case you’re interested, the Toyota Supra won that particular comparison test.

ALMS WINNERS TALK THE TALK

The Corvette C6.R goes door to door with the Porsche GT3 RSR at Laguna Seca.

Want another reason why these two cars are so comparable? For the last decade or so, Corvettes and 911s have been duking it out all hot and heavy in ALMS. True, they were in different classes for years, but in 2009, ALMS eliminated the usually Corvette-only GT1, and now the C6.R Vette goes head to head with the Porsche GT3 RSR, as well as the Jaguar XKRS, Ferrari F430 GT, BMW M3, and the odd Spyker C8.

Two drivers in particular have captured our fancy: 22-time ALMS winner Jan Magnussen for Corvette and last year’s GT2 champ and Daytona 24 Hour winner Jorg Bergmeister for Porsche. Fans of ALMS will never forget the Chevrolet-on-Porsche violence during the last lap at Laguna Seca 2009. (Of course, depending on which side you root for, that could be construed as Porsche-on-Chevrolet violence.) We got both drivers’ takes on why this rivalry is so much fun for fans.

Magnussen on the ZR1: “It’s the most fantastic Corvette ever built. Everything about it is an improvement compared with the Z06. There’s no car that comes remotely close.”

Magnussen on the key to beating Porsche: “The Corvette is faster-everywhere on the track.”

Bergmeister on the key to beating the Corvette: “In terms of handling, we have an advantage over them. They have a power and torque advantage, but I think we have won three races this year and they have won zero.”– Jonny Lieberman

Torque

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